


The Imperial Knee

by Barkour



Category: Ben 10 Series
Genre: Ben 10: Omniverse, Episode Tag, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 21:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of "Many Happy Returns," Kevin and Gwen have a chat about honesty, appropriate things to do in cars, and where to go for the rest of spring break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Imperial Knee

They’d peeled out of the wedding plaza—thing—and boy, could his baby take a beating and come out kicking. The engine rumbled like it wanted more.

Kevin flexed his fingers around the wheel. He didn’t really have to look to know Gwen had crossed her arms or that she was glaring at him. That was what relationships did to you. They got you all familiar with other people. 

She’d folded her legs, too, and that was a hell of a thing when she wore a skirt like that. He’d seen a movie once about a bus driver who crashed because he couldn’t get his eyes off some lady’s thighs in the car over. That driver’d never seen Gwen’s thighs, all lean and muscled and freckled from her knees on up to the soft inside of her thighs right where—

“Right lane,” said Gwen.

He corrected course before ramming into the back of some Mustang. Lousy paint job. Looked like somebody had taken a dump on it.

“All right,” Kevin said. “So, you’ve probably got some questions.”

“Oh, I have a few,” said Gwen. She unfolded her legs then refolded them the other way so her right knee pointed to him. The rest of her turned to follow. It was maybe a teeny bit quailing, having that much frosty Gwen focused on him all at once. “Do you want them in descending order of importance or ascending order of importance?”

“Eh, shoot ‘em however you like. I can take it.” 

Kevin flipped on the left blinker and coasted through a yellow light turning red. Another driver braked short of them and honked angrily. Kevin flipped that guy a blinker of his own. 

“Okay, well, A,” said Gwen, ticking a finger, “why did you trick Ben into marrying some space Amazon princess?”

“They’re not married yet,” Kevin protested. “Just, like. Engaged. They got a lot of time to figure things out.”

Gwen ticked off a second finger. “B, when were you going to mention the fact that you had a space Amazon princess fiancée to me?”

He rubbed his thumbs up the inside of the steering wheel. Red light ahead and two cars in front. No choice but to brake. Damn, and they’d be stuck at this intersection another five minutes.

“Well,” he said, “to be honest I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t come up.”

She snorted at this, and her glasses slipped just a bit lower on her nose. Since she’d stopped using so much foundation to cover up, her freckles showed through all across her face. When she reached to tap her glasses back in place, her fingertip slid along that trail of freckles that dotted the narrow bridge of her nose.

“Right,” said Gwen. “And when has that ever worked out for you?”

He shrugged and rested his arm along the windowsill. Window was down, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try and put his muscular shoulders on display as best he could. For good measure, he spread his thighs out a little, too. Get that beef out there.

“It’s true,” he said. “I’m pretty good-looking.”

Gwen turned her face away, too late. He caught her smile in the window. Kevin tapped his fingers on the sill and took the green light easy. His chest was a little loose; that was all. Heart a little warm.

“Oh, yeah,” said Gwen to her reflection, “Kevin Ethan Levin. Intergalactic heartbreaker. Catch of the universe.”

“What can I say?” Kevin shrugged magnanimously. Yeah, it made his shoulders look good. “Ladies love a bad boy.”

“Not all ladies,” Gwen scoffed. She ran a hand through her hair. She’d had it cut some two or three weeks ago and now it hugged her neck even as it tipped out, too. “My mother still thinks you’re going to turn me to a life of crime.”

“Hey, I only do legal stuff now. Or, you know, grey area.” He glanced sidelong at her, taking in the whole of her, from her red hair to her square hips to those gorgeous, knobby, freckled knees. “But you do look hot in a catsuit.”

They were out on the interchange now, out of Bellwood’s downtown and closing in on the highway.

“And you’d look good in a fitted tux,” said Gwen. She eyed him speculatively. Checking out the shoulders, yeah. “Although that wouldn’t really be battle efficient.”

“No way,” he agreed. He’d done the tux thing for her a couple times and that way her lashes went down low and her shoulders rose up and she’d put her light, strong hands on his chest and then slide them up around his neck aside—not worth the trouble. Maybe a little worth the trouble.

Bellwood was steadily receding in the mirrors. He thought maybe he should miss it the way Gwen still did sometimes, but it hadn’t meant the same things to him that it meant to her. The city was just a place. His car, that was something more like home. Gwen—she was even closer. 

Gwen had cried in the car on the way up to the campus, the way she always did when she couldn't help but cry, like she was mad about it but lonely, too, and daring you to say something about it. He hadn’t known what to say. He didn’t think she’d wanted him to say anything at all. So somewhere around the fifty mile mark, he’d just reached over and rubbed at her bent nape. She’d had long hair then and she’d worn it loose that day, so when he stroked her skin, he stroked her hair, too.

Kevin merged into highway traffic. Gwen, still turned away, sighed a little. She was watching Bellwood, quickly going, in the side mirror.

“I like your new hair,” Kevin said. It just kind of came out.

Gwen turned, just slightly, to glance over her shoulder at him. She was mostly turned away from him, so it was the only the faintest suggestion of her lip that showed, only the little half-curve, from this angle, of her nose. Her knee still pointed to him. Her glasses made her eyes seem smaller than they were, but her eyes were still green and her lashes still brown and the glasses hugged her ears.

“Your glasses, too,” he said. “They, uh. They’re nice.”

“I didn’t do any of this for you,” said Gwen dryly.

Kevin hunched his shoulders. “I know,” he grumbled. “I just. You know. I like it. You look nice.”

“You’re not worried?” she teased. “That I don’t dress up for you anymore. I don’t put on make-up. Gave up contacts…”

“Naw,” he said. 

He was thinking of another time, a year ago, when Gwen had touched his hands, his face, and he was metal and stone and clay and alien shit, and she’d leaned up to kiss him anyway. 

He said, “I don’t care about that stuff.” She’d said something like that then.

Fingers spider-walked up his arm. He startled. Gwen had leaned across the armrest separating them, and now she ran her fingers up to his shoulder. She was smiling, her eyebrows arched.

“So now that you’ve run us out of Bellwood,” she said, “and don’t think you’re off the hook for that yet—”

“What,” said Kevin, “you’re gonna make me sleep on my cot?”

She ignored this. “Where do you want to go for the rest of spring break?”

“I don’t know,” he said, making a face. “Wherever you want to go, I guess.”

Gwen hummed thoughtfully. She rested her arm on his shoulder, and her wrist dangled, draped over his breast. Her chin she planted on his arm. How she expected him to keep driving like this was beyond him. Thank God he and the car were spiritually and psychically one.

“Library of Congress,” she said.

“I’d do anything for love,” said Kevin, “but I won’t do that. Said Meatball.”

“We could do a tour of the Smithsonian museums?”

“We could visit the Nascar Hall of Fame.”

“If I wanted to watch you get hot about cars, I’d just go see you at work,” said Gwen.

“You do come see me at work,” Kevin said, looking over at her. “You like seeing me at work.”

Gwen sighed. “Sometimes you get all greasy and then you take your shirt off.”

“Gwendolyn I forget your middle name Tennyson,” said Kevin, “you are a dirty woman. You’re getting your filth all over my car.”

She squinted at him. With her nose scrunching like that and her glasses sticking out, and her lips pursing, too, geez, oh, geez, he kind of wanted to just pull over on the side and pull her into his lap. Get his hands up that skirt of hers and listen to her lecture about highway safety and public decency.

“You’re the one who wants to make out in it all the time,” she said.

“It’s a transformational experience,” he said. “Man. Woman. Machine. And anyway, you started it last time.”

He’d been doing a dramatic reading out of her Renaissance Literature textbook when out of nowhere Gwen had lunged for him. He’d got a stick shift in the hip for his troubles, but Gwen reciting John Donne poetry in his ear, too:

“Her swelling lips; to which when we are come,  
We anchor there, and think ourselves at home—”

And damn, all right, he could live with a stick shift in just about any part of his body if it meant Gwen saying things like that to him while she ran her warm, warm hands down his arms till he felt like he was pulling her into him or she was pulling him into her. And maybe once or twice—maybe then, maybe some other time—Kevin had thought he’d like to stay like that, not just for a little while, not just for a long while, but maybe the whole deal, the chase someone halfway across the galaxy to marry them deal. Who needed a space Amazon when Gwen was all the Amazon he could ever want?

Gwen’s cheek settled against his shoulder. She was warm beside him, subdued Anodite energy always thrumming so very close to her skin, and God, he wanted to just sink into her all the way, just taste her all over: freckles, knobby joints, thick hips, even the little indentations on the sides of her nose where her glasses pressed into them.

Driving. Driving. Right. He was driving.

“Oh!” said Gwen, squeezing his shoulder.

He tightened his grip on the wheel instinctively.

Straightening, she wheeled on him. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art! They’re doing an exhibit on impressionism.”

“Sure,” said Kevin, his throat still dry, “yeah, let’s do that, let’s go to the Metropolis Art Museum.”

“Goofball,” said Gwen affectionately. And she flicked her fingertip down his cheek.

Hey, he had to face the facts: wherever Gwen was going, he was going, too. Kevin figured he was all right with that. Looma had chased him across star systems; he could go to some art gallery with Gwen. The important thing was, as he could tell it, while Kevin had run, seeking refuge from Looma and some hare-brained commitment he'd made in exchange for an engine—a damn fine engine, to be fair, highest quality in this entire chartered quarter of the galaxy—Gwen had ran her hand up Kevin's shoulder and smiled at him and asked him to come along. Who was he to let someone like Gwen Tennyson down? Just one hell of a lucky guy. He'd take it.

**Author's Note:**

> The movie Kevin's thinking of is "Heart and Souls" (1993).
> 
> Kevin's referencing the musician Meat Loaf, not Meatball. I figure he's probably not entirely up to date on 1980s pop culture. That, or he's just messing around. (He's messing around.) The song itself is "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)."
> 
> The poem quoted is, as stated, by John Donne, and the title is drawn from the same poem:
> 
> "Civility we see refined; the kiss  
> Which at the face began, transplanted is,  
> Since to the hand, since to the imperial knee,  
> Now at the papal foot delights to be[...]"
> 
> \--"Elegy XVIII: Love's Progress," by John Donne. You may find the poem easily in its entirety on-line. :)


End file.
